Your hearing is considered one of the largest modifiable risk factors for dementia from midlife onward. It is also one of the few that can be measured precisely, tracked annually, and corrected. We do all three.
Higher dementia risk for every 10 decibels of hearing you lose. The relationship is linear — there is no threshold you are safely under.
Slower cognitive decline over three years among higher-risk adults who received hearing intervention, in the first large randomised trial to test it.
Lower long-term risk of cognitive decline among people whose hearing is corrected, pooled across 137,484 participants and up to 25 years of follow-up.
In 2024 the Lancet Commission named hearing loss the single largest modifiable risk factor for dementia from midlife.
Fourteen factors were identified in total, together accounting for roughly 45% of dementia cases worldwide. Most of them you already manage: blood pressure, LDL, activity, glucose, sleep, alcohol.
Hearing is the one almost nobody has a number for. It is also, unusually, one that must be acted on in midlife — intervening late yields limited benefit.
Degraded input forces the brain to spend on decoding what it used to spend on remembering and reasoning. Sustained over years, that cognitive load is compounded by measurable atrophy in auditory cortex and the right temporal lobe.
You do not experience this as hearing loss. You experience it as a tiring dinner, a name you didn't catch, a meeting you stopped contributing to.
One number, unique to you.
Air and bone, 250 Hz to 8 kHz, both ears, in a calibrated booth. The number that gets tracked year over year, in decibels, with the annual delta.
The measure that actually predicts a restaurant, a boardroom, a trail conversation into the wind. Thresholds can look normal while this is already degrading.
How much work your brain is doing to keep up. This is the variable the dementia evidence is actually about, and the one nobody measures.
Shooting, aviation, motorsport, trades, orchestras, decades of headphones. Plus the co-factors — blood pressure, glucose, LDL — that travel with hearing in the same risk models.
Your Baseline document: this year's values, the delta against every prior year, and a specific recommendation. Filed alongside your bloodwork, because it belongs there.
A single page you can hand to any physician. Values, trend, recommendation. No sales language, because nothing is being sold.
You already own equipment that corrects for aging.
Prescription lenses. A power meter. A CGM. Custom insoles. None of them are concessions — they are instruments, calibrated to you, that let you operate at your actual capability.
Hearing equipment belongs in that category. Modern units are invisible in wear, adaptive by environment, and tuned to your specific audiogram rather than a generic curve. We programme them against your Baseline and re-tune them every year as it moves.
One clinician. One appointment at a time. Ninety minutes, not twenty.
Independent and clinician-owned, which means the recommendation you get is not attached to a manufacturer's sales targets. Located in Calgary and Edmonton
Ninety minutes, once a year. The first one establishes your number. Every one after that tells you whether it is holding.